A Drive Through the Black Hills
IT is five o’clock A. M. as we pass through Buffalo Gap and swing up Fall River Cañon. The walls of the cañon are steep; the sky is like a gray awning stretched from cliff to cliff. The old moon worn to a thin crescent drops an occasional spangle into the river, which goes tumbling from us, first on one side of the track, then on the other. Every now and again the noise of the locomotive is drowned by the roar of a waterfall, a roar which is half echo, and the falls assume strange breadths and elongations in the half-light. We leave a trail of curling white smoke behind us, which pulls itself out into a long swirl and hangs like mist over the water. The atmosphere is peculiarly clear. Gradually the sky turns a winter gray, and seems to rise slowly and majestically beyond the reach of the crags; things begin to take individual forms ; the pines loosen themselves from the black mass of the walls ; the boulders assert their curves ; the river is turning a nacreous pink, because of a great blush that has risen from the east and swallowed the pale slip of the old moon. As we ascend, the sky steadily rises and broadens above us. Then the pink blush gives way to a luminous blue, and the world seems suddenly to have broken into color. We shoot a long, shrill whistle at a little white town at the head of the cañon and slacken our pace. We have reached the Minnekahta Hot Springs. We are at the threshold of the Black Hills.
Minnekahta Hot Springs, October 1. It is a day all of light, — one of those dazzling days of Indian summer when one can find stars in the atmosphere. The season is over, and the hotels begin to look like dance-halls by daylight. The towns supported by tourists, agricultural or stock interests, could come only with the reflux from the mining districts, and are consequently of a more recent date.
Minnekahta Springs is three years old. The rheumatic ranchman of early days, or the cowboy who first took a run this way to soothe the exasperation of the Texas distemper, had his bath in an Indian tub hewn out of stone, shaped like a moccasin. This tub was the nucleus of a little thermal town of tepees, which soon melted away before a claim cabin ; and then this claim cabin, constituting to itself what might be called the old quarter, was put on wheels and unceremoniously trotted off to the far end of the town, to make way for the stone hotel at which we are stopping. There are a few persons here who, like ourselves, are about to take a driving tour; others who, relieved of a slight touch of rheumatism, linger on to follow up their cure with the tonic of long walks; and after them the invalids. The real invalids, with the gleam of faith in their eyes, — one meets them everywhere: on their crutches, in their roller chairs, on the porches in the sunlight, in the ambulances on their way to the baths. They tell their story with febrile enthusiasm every time the trains bring them a fresh audience. It is always the same story, to be sure, — how they were brought here upon a stretcher, how much worse they felt at first, then how the congealed sap in their limbs seemed to thaw in the soft warm water. Now they can go about; they are born anew; and they smile that wan, beatific smile which painters draw on the lips of the resurrected. They are familiar with the properties of all the thermal waters of the country. They know the analysis of the springs by heart. Peroxide of iron, calcium sulphate, magnesium sulphate, are words which, on their lips, assume the significance of a litany. One might fancy one’s self at Lourdes, listening to the hallelujahs of the paralytic restored to flexibility by a miracle. A sad little world this, half concealed, during the summer months, among Saturday evening hops and outdoor concerts by the band, but exposed now in all its naked sadness, — a world in which pain has exhausted every idea but one, and from which the mind carries away pictures of an indescribable pathos : disconnected visions of the stoop of a back, the rigidity of a neck, a knitted shawl pinned with a woman’s brooch around the shrunken shoulders of a man still young.
From Hot Springs we turn our horses’ heads toward Custer. We drive under a sky that seems to twinkle with electric flashes, and over a rolling prairie covered with yellow buffalo grass. At the end of two hours we reach Wind Cave, where we make a halt to explore its recesses. The old Custer stage road, as we find it again, after leaving the cave, leads us up through a region so totally different from that which we have left behind us that it would seem as though the world had been transformed during the five hours we spent underground. We drive through an arroyo inclosed between rugged gray palisades surmounted by pines which are extremely tall and rich in color. The hollow of the arroyo is filled with the quivering gold of the cottonwood. Every now and then the eye is caught and held by the intense tone of a scarlet vine flung around the trunk of a tree, or creeping among mosses, over gray rocks. The walls of the cañon broaden and rise, the palisades disappear, and we drive on for several miles between thickly wooded parks, strangely wild and lonely. The hush of the wood is occasionally broken by a startled deer that goes bounding from us and loses himself in the colonnade of pines. Chipmunks, with erect tails, skim like exhalations along the fallen trees, and flights of belated bluebirds, that seem unusually blue, rise with a whir and vanish in the velvet tops of the pines. As we emerge upon a height, we are suddenly confronted by imposing masses of granite bearing the eccentric name of Calamity Jane Peaks. These masses are the southern portals of the granite region of the Hills. It is difficult to put into words the impression that these strange uplifts produce. They are massive enough to create the impression of squarely seated, immovable weight, and yet they are high enough to be hold. The vegetation at their base is luxuriant, and still they have expanse enough of bare gray rock to be dreary. The Jane of the terrible epithet who gave her name to these heights was the first to ascend them, and is said to have celebrated the event by tossing up her cap and riddling it with bullets, in full view of the troops below. This extraordinary product of frontierism made her appearance in the Hills in 1875 with the troops accompanying Professor Jenney’s scientific expedition. The people of Custer remember her in buckskins, six-shooter in belt, riding among the soldiers, and answering the roll call, to the mystification of the officers. Her feats of valor and misdeeds filled this wild region with anecdotes. After having carried a woman’s caprices through all the most reckless phases of a man’s life, she fell a victim to the tender passion, and is now leading an existence of conjugal felicity somewhere in Montana. " Of woman flesh and horse flesh,” the Arabs say, “ one can predict nothing.”
Pushing on through Custer, and leaving the stage road, we find ourselves again immersed in a forest of wonderful beauty. The ground is covered with a thick carpet of k’neck-k’neck green, with the green of the holly, and bearing berries like a thick sprinkling of coral beads. Here we find spruce, some fir, clumps of willows with a feathery Japanesque effect, and a young growth of birch and aspen, a tangle of wire limbs from which the round yellow leaves dangle like gold coins, whiffed off by the first cold winds in little dancing oblique showers. Great granite masses hump their backs above the trees. This beautiful wood is called Custer Park. The centre of the park forms a bed of about ten acres inclosed between granite palisades, which is to be filled, I believe, and converted into a lake. At the far end from Custer, and overlooking what is known as Sunday Gulch, the granite piles rise to a height of three and four hundred feet. They are broad and massive, or cut into sawteeth and slim needles of a most toppling effect. Down the almost vertical cañon of which these are the walls comes what would seem like a cataract of boulders suddenly stopped in their course. Beneath them is a thin stream fighting its way to the valley. Each step down these boulders changes the scene as if by magic. The needles present different shapes and poses at every angle ; they seem to rise, bend, and execute all manner of ponderous movements. In the far distance of peaceful blue the Castle Creek divide is stretched across the narrow horizon, restful and dreamy in contrast with the tormented foreground.
We return to Custer by the same road, which we scarcely recognize. While we were in the cañon a snowstorm swept the forest, and transformed it. It is not earnest snow, however. The flakes are small and light. They have merely thrown a sheen upon the pines and powdered the willows. The sky is gray, but very soft. The sun looks down upon us like a luminous wafer. This is the first of those mock storms of early October that brush the sky and leave it pure and blue until Christmas.
Harney Peak, October 9. We are, in reality, only eighty - two hundred feet above the sea, but we are on the pinnacle of the Black Hills, and, as all things are relative, we seem to be standing on the summit of things, with the world rolling from us to the horizon in great circular waves.
According to Professor Henry Newton, the geology of the Black Hills is simply and generally as follows : “ Around a nucleal area of metamorphic slates and schists containing masses of granite, the various members of the sedimentary series of rocks — the Potsdams, carboniferous, trias or red beds, Jura, cretaceous, and tertiary — lie in rudely concentric belts or zones of varying width, dipping on all sides away from the elevatory axis of the Hills. From the Hills outward the inclination of the beds gradually diminishes, until all evidence of the elevation is lost in the usually rolling configuration of the Plains. . . . Separated as they are by more than one hundred miles from the nearest spur or subrange of the Rocky Mountains, they are a complete study in themselves. Exhibiting in the strata exposed and in the general character of the elevation most of the principal features of the geology of the Rocky Mountains, they are a geological epitome of the neighboring portions of that great range.” It has elsewhere been said, very graphically, that the central nucleus has been thrust up through the different sedimentary formations much as one could thrust his fist up through the layers of a very large jelly cake. If the Hills were shorn of their timber, we could almost realize, from the summit on which we stand, that the bedding planes that dip from us are nearly perpendicular. As it is, what we really see is a wilderness of wooded peaks encircled by a broad valley, the Red Valley, which the Indians call the Race Course, in turn inclosed by a wall of foothills. It is all curiously symmetrical, — a castle of geologic dimensions, with domes and turrets and a broad moat within its ramparts. Among the domes and turrets rise the innumerable streams that scar the mountain sides with cañons and gulches, and then disappear before reaching the valley wherever the limestone deposits open for them a subterranean passage.
Of the snow that fell a few days since the sun has left but a delicate arabesque upon the granite cap of this pinnacle. Double rows of enormous needles radiate from us to the foot of the mountain like great causeways, which the pines seem to be climbing in solemn, star-gazing files. I can find no word luminous enough to qualify the atmosphere. It is literally of light, of that intense light which cheats distances and draws the horizons nearer together. We look through our eyelashes over the heads of mountains, and see the far-off plains and the snow-covered ranges of other States. Nebraska lies south of us, flat and yellow, like a great ripe cornfield. Wyoming ends in an undulating line of blue, the Bighorn, touched here and there with a glint of snow. To the west we look into the accursed region of the Bad Lands, redeemed and transfigured by the glory of the sun into a broad plain of pure gold. Then there is the unidentified distance, the most beautiful of all, — the vaporous blue country of dreams, in which we loosen our fancies, and which send us back a peaceful mood.
On our way down we go winding about the great causeways, from the heights of which we should look like a hurrying procession of ants, if there were any one there to look at us. But we are sure of being entirely alone on the mountain. The mountain sheep-trail loses itself constantly among the low-limbed spruce, under the moss, or around the huge piles of granite. There is something delicious in this loneliness and silence, — not a sound but the forest sounds, which come to be other forms of stillness, a breath of wind in the trees, the trickling of a spring. We realize the grade of our trail as we reach the foot of the mountain. We have been less than two hours covering a course which it took us over three hours to ascend.
As we travel to Deadwood from Hill City, which is the nearest neighbor of importance to Custer, we leave the granites behind us. The deep cañons through which we pass are inclosed within flaky heights of slate rock. We are traversing another geological zone. We are gradually losing the pines, too. Within some twenty miles of Deadwood the Hills are entirely bare, shorn to supply the great reduction works with fuel. The streams that come tumbling toward us are all of a reddish-brown, like liquid clay. They have been interrupted in their course, and this is the way they have returned to their beds, after a whirl through the great mills and a close contact wdth gold.
Deadwood, the great mining centre of the Hills, lies in the deep gulches of the Whitewood and the Deadwood creeks. It has been twice destroyed: once by fire in 1879, when property to the extent of a million and a half is said to have evaporated in pine smoke; then again in 1883, when abnormal snows and rains sent the mountain streams down the gulches in torrents ; and, strange to say, it was both times rebuilt upon its original site, with the main street running down the gulch, and the cross-streets scrambling up the hillsides, over the very ground where the miners of 1876 staked their claims and panned out their gold. The wild days of the history of Deadwood are included between 1877 and 1885, the days of “excitements,” of “ hurdy-gurdies ” and the hazing of the “tenderfoot;" for, although the town was incorporated as a city in 1880, its mining-camp character disappeared totally only several years after that time.
From 1876 to 1877 the pioneers may be said to have fought the grizzly and the elements. The striking feature of Deadwood to-day is its decorousness, at least its outward decorousness. It is, perhaps, that of the blasé, who has had his fill of the kind of excitement which finds a vent in noise and broils. Be this as it may, the streets of this town of men, and of men more or less bent on the same pursuit, and breathing an atmosphere avowedly intoxicating, are as quiet by night as they are by day. The advent of two railroads, with their narrow gauges to Lead City and Bald Mountain, their spurs up every gulch and to the very dumps of nearly every mine, absorbing all the traffic formerly done by ox-teams, drays, and stages, has cleared the streets of much noise and incumbrance, but also of much local color. In such towns as this the typical disappears with the lawless.
From Deadwood to Bald Mountain, by the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley narrow-gauge railroad. Another blue day. This is the 12th of October, and the air is almost balmy. The scenery is full of beauty, and even of grandeur at certain points. Our train, which looks like a toy, is running up impossible heights and describing impossible curves, skirting precipices and skimming over trellises, leaving its tracks below in a tangle of loops and bends. A wonderful piece of engineering, the construction of this road, — attacking a grade of 4.30 feet to the mile in some places, and describing a curve of 38°. After an hour’s ascent, the heights that close us in seem suddenly to drop away, and we look over an immeasurable expanse of dark blue hills and yellow prairies. Our car is wedged in between ore cars and flat cars. Our fellow-passengers consist of a German family of well-fed rotundity, and a stubby little pigeon-toed Chinese woman, whose wrists are covered with bangles, and whose shining chignon is bristling with brass pins. On the flat car behind us is a group of an equally foreign appearance, — two middle-aged men, a boy, and a young woman. They have strong faces of a pronounced northern type. They do not seem to feel the necessity of conversation. The woman sits with her chin in her hand, her almost colorless gaze fixed on some point in the horizon. The boy holds a puppy in his arms, which he strokes now and then very soberly. The train stops in the midst of what would seem a wilderness. Our neighbors climb down, and unload the car with strong agility. They have lumber, a case of window panes, boxes and bags of groceries, bags of utensils and tools, bedding and clothes tied in a horse blanket, and a small stove, — an embryo home. The things are heaped on either side of the track, and as the train pulls off they stand amid their household goods, screening their eyes from the sun, and watch us disappear around a curve. As we lose them, I feel as though I had peeped into the first chapter of a story and dropped the book by the wayside.
From Bald Mountain we make one of the crossings and catch the Black Hills and Fort Pierre narrow gauge, which takes us down to Piedmont. This ride is, perhaps, more beautiful than the one up Bald Mountain, with all the effects reversed. We spin down grade, and the hills and high masses of rock seem to be climbing over each other and flying from us in a panic. We pass great fields of glistening stubble ; stacks of harvested grain of a duller gold; peaceful nooks sheltered by high hills, where trim little cabins have been built in the centre of cabbage-planted stretches; soft pastures where cows are browsing. Then we drop suddenly into a wild cañon inclosed between great cliffs of limestone, full of sombreness and echoes. At Piedmont we find our horses, and, resuming our drive, we reach Sturgis in the full glow of sunset. Sunset in these Hills is an hour of transfiguration. The little towns which we come upon then may have a prosaic side, but they are very apt to carry this halo with them in our memory.
The horizon is of a complex, bewildering order of beauty. If the colors on birds’ wings, the varying tints of shells, and the lights that opals catch could be blended and vaporized, they might produce something of this effect. Sturgis, like a little dreamland town, lies in a valley with a slight inclination toward a creek that looks as if it were a rainbow lying on the ground. This valley is the Red Valley, the Indian Race Course, the great agricultural zone of the Hills. Although it completely encircles the Hills, it is not everywhere so fertile as it is in this eastern portion ; for, the slope of the country being east, all the streams rising in the central and western Hills drain these regions on their way to the Cheyenne. The heaviest rainfalls, too, occur here, enabling the farmer to dispense with irrigation to a great extent.
All the winds that blow over the Black Hills have swept the plains for great distances, and bring what moisture they have gathered to these peaks to be condensed into rain. These Hills, therefore, manufacture their own climate, and manage to keep their vegetation green and fresh when the plains are parched with thirst. Some localities do more condensing work than others, however, for the contributions vary with the different winds. Those from the north bring little moisture with them from the cold Canadian regions; the cargo of the southern winds is intercepted long before reaching these latitudes ; the Pacific winds, depositing almost all their moisture in rain and snow along the Rocky Mountains, give the Hills only that which they may have collected on the intervening plains ; and so it happens that the eastern winds, sweeping up from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, in spite of all they deposit along the Alleghanies and the Mississippi Valley, bring the heaviest freight of moisture with them for distribution along these eastern slopes.
The great product of these valleys is wheat; that is, more attention has been given to its cultivation, and Black Hills wheat has a higher grade in the market to-day than that of northern Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, or Iowa. But the growth of all small grains is equally luxuriant, and corn, heretofore supposed to require totally different conditions, is now beginning to prove a sure crop. The similitude between the flora of the Hills and that of southern Maine and New Hampshire in the same latitude, as determined by late scientific explorations, would indicate that the fruit and vegetables of those States must also flourish here. These things will be verified as soon as agriculturalists shall have entirely supplanted the farming miners, attracted to the country by gold, and who turned to land claims only as a makeshift, when mining claims were not within reach.
Ascending the foothills that overlook Sturgis, one comes suddenly in view of Bare Butte. Unlike the usual Western formation called " butte,” this particular Indian watch-tower is a rock with evidences of erosion, what the miners call float. It is difficult to form an idea of a butte, if one has never seen one. Buttes are usually formations of yellowish clay, bare of vegetation, and strangely suggestive of a construction, — a fortress, or a town of queer roofs huddled together within a stuccoed wall. They are a great relief to the eye and the mind, breaking as they do the horizontal monotony of the plain. There is an indescribable lonesomeness about them, — that lonesomeness which gives personality to an inanimate thing. To the early explorers the coming upon a butte must have been like the first sight of a caravan to a man who is crossing the desert. Bare Butte, being of rock, differs widely from the usual butte. In the golden air of Indian summer it seems translucent. The projections that are licked by the sun are of various degrees of golden brown, and their shadows are a deep purple. It lies like a great camel carved out of rough topaz and amethyst, looking over a yellow desert.
It was in the shadow of this butte that the military camp which eventually became Fort Meade was located. It was then known as Camp Sturgis, in honor of Lieutenant “Jack” Sturgis, who was killed at the Custer massacre. The present position of Fort Meade was determined by General Sheridan in 1876. The site is a superb one, both from a scenic and a strategic standpoint. This ten-company post means much to the little town of Sturgis, and in fact to the whole county in which it is situated. The quantity of supplies consumed by its men and horses is enormous.
Our route to Spearfish takes us along the Race Course through cultivated lands, by thriving farms, well-built farmhouses, fenced fields filled with the gleaming stubble of oats and timothy. From Spearfish to the Bear Gulch we drive sixteen miles through a dense pine forest, the air saturated with a resinous smell. By the ups and downs of the road we perceive that we are traveling west, but the great wall of pines never once opens a breach. Within this pine forest is a young forest of oaks, and, further up, a forest of aspens, leafless now, like trees of silver wire, delicate and fragile, shrouding the body of pines in a haze of vaporous gray. We dine deliciously on grouse and fresh vegetables at the lonely Bear Gulch camp, and turn our horses’ heads eastward again.
Nothing could be more beautiful than the valley drive between the Spearfish and the Belle Fourche. We have two hours, at least, before we strike the rolling stock range. The Belle Fourehe River, the beautiful fork of the Cheyenne, gives its name to a little town opened on the 1st of last June, and now a shipping point of no small importance. From June to October sixty thousand head of cattle were taken from here by the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley railroad. This is essentially the cowboy’s pied-à-terre. With its floating population it counts about two hundred and fifty souls. Almost half as many again are in the place to-day, for it is fair-day, and the ranches within a radius of twenty-five miles have emptied themselves here to witness the races. Ponies are anchored by their hanging bridles in a line along the row of stores and cabins that constitute the town. Vehicles of every imaginable sort, from sulkies to hayracks, stand outside, tilted forward, with their shafts and poles on the ground. Flaring bills, tacked up on every available background, proclaim the attractions of the race course. Besides the usual trotting, pacing, and running races, there are to be steer - roping contests, ladies’ races, and finally, as a bouquet, a purse of twenty-five dollars for the cowboy who will start his pony, mount, light a cigar, open an umbrella, dismount, mount again, and be back at the stand in a given number of minutes. In the parlor of the hotel, where we stop for an hour, that our horses may be fed, we find numerous other evidences of the fair. The walls are hung with much elaborate fancy-work: satin banners painted to represent embroidery, embroidered banners made to represent painting, — all more or less awry on brass rods, — many species of crochet, and every variant of the tidy. A number of women sit here while their husbands go out to “ hitch.” Two girls are talking over their winter’s course at the Spearfish normal school. A small bony German woman and a ponderous American in sealskin and black plumes are excitedly discussing a conjugal problem which refers to the question whether milking the cow is the duty of the man or the woman.
Our horses being ready, we push on toward Sundance, over miles of stock range. This grass land, sweeping off to the horizon in every direction, has some of the grandeur of the desert with all the cheerful beauty of fertility. In the summer this is a vast, many - colored meadow. Now it is all gold ; the frost has gilded it. There is a fascination in looking over the wheels at the ground running from under us, and noticing the infinite variety of grasses that go to make a prairie, — the short copper-tinted blades, the greenish-yellow frizzles, the silky meshes with all the lights and shadows of golden hair, the stretches that are like a pale haze powdered with fine seeds. It is like the fascination of looking over the side of a ship into the blue and green lights of the sea.
The stockman in these parts has indeed little expense, and less care. The cattle and horses roam over the range all winter. The grasses, which cure into rich hay on the ground, give them a pasture as nutritious in January as it is in June. All that is required of the stockman is that he know his own stock. “ The Black Hills are gold from the grass roots down, but there ’s still more gold from the grass roots up,” is perhaps the wisest remark ever attributed to “ California Joe.”
As we approach Sundance a broken line of hills rises along the yellow horizon. The sun is setting without a cloud to catch the colors. The hills assume metallic tints, like the blues and greens of verdigris. The west is all of a reddish copper glow, which shoots over the dome of the sky and hangs over the east in a faint pink, — so faint that it is like a blush in the air. The disk of the sun is blood-red and enormous. A little bunch of horses, startled at our appearance, stop for a second on the summit of a mound directly in front of us, and stand, with flying manes, in strange black foreshortenings, against the sun. In the pink blush of the east a star of silver filigree is taking to itself light.
In the heart of the cattle country rises Sundance Mountain, an almost isolated elevation, rock-flanked and leveltopped, like a great stage, upon which one can fancy the Indians performing their religious dance, with the witness of the horizons. In its shadow is the white town of Sundance, evolved out of a road ranch and a saloon as soon as farms began to spring up in the valley, and the rising stock industry had begun to sprinkle the range with horses and cattle. It is now an agricultural as well as a stock centre. We are within near sight of the Bear Lodge range and Inyan Kara (“ the peak which makes stone ”). Inyan Kara stands about six hundred feet out of an encircling rim that suggests the throat of a crater. It is so abrupt that it seems perpendicular at some angles. The igneous rocks of which it is composed, like Bare Butte, have all the deep, gorgeous tones of rough jewels. Warren’s Peak, the crowning peak of the Bear Lodge range, though some two thousand feet higher, is less prominent for being set in the centre of others which diminish gradually and reach the valley by rounded grasscovered steps. From these heights one looks out upon an infinite space of blue, and down upon Mato Tepee, the Bear Lodge which gives its name to the range. Mato Tepee is generally known as the Devil’s Tower; for it seems that, among the Indians, it is more commonly spoken of now as " the Tower of the Bad God.” At this distance it looks like an obelisk of basalt on a plain. The current hypotheses are in favor of its being the core that was left standing when a cataclysm had torn open some great volcano by the mouth and scattered its flanks, or of its having been ejected with great violence when in a liquid state, and solidified by sadden cooling. But the geologists who have studied this region believe that the tower was forced up “ through the sedimentary strata under great pressure, and at such a temperature as to make it plastic rather than fluid ; ” that, had it been otherwise, the sedimentary rocks tilted around it would have been more metamorphosed than they are by igneous heat. Approached from Sundance, it presents a number of varied aspects, according to the different angles from which it is seen : now a great fluted column, a tall black truncated cone ; again a tremendous organ, whose pipes shoot out of a hill and converge at the top. It is gray, or black, or purple, in sympathy with the clouds or the sun, and as one draws nearer the great pipes seem to pull themselves out indefinitely toward the sky. Standing at its base, one realizes that these columns are triangular or hexagonal crystals, of a yellowish-drab delicately tinted with green. They are, as it were, the fibres of the obelisk, and rise over six hundred feet perpendicularly out of a massive base. The entire tower is over eleven hundred feet high from the Belle Fourche, on the bank of which it stands. The hill which forms its pedestal is a mass of huge rocks, parts of the crystals fallen from time to time. The impression produced by this isolated and mysterious structure is one of amazement. It has never been scaled, and adventurous tourists must ever stand hopeless at its base, with all the longing which is bred of prohibition.
From Sundance to Newcastle, October 20. It is a typical Wyoming day. The sky is of indigo. A moon of thin white lace is setting amidst gauzy swirls of wind clouds. There is a fierceness in the light which strikes blinding flashes from the ploughshares, and makes the streams look like polished steel. The land is of every tone and quality of gold, from the metallic glitter of the wheat stubble to the dull haze of the wild grasses upon which the wind makes little shadowy eddies. Bunches of horses with flying manes are herded past us. It is astonishing how long we can see them. Their forms and movements are perfectly distinct when they have dwindled to the size of dogs. Then we lose the motion, they appear to be standing still, till they suddenly seem to shrivel and be dissolved in light.
At the end of about thirty miles our road begins to climb the side of a densely wooded hill; we go down into ravines, then up again, higher each time, the horizon expanding and sinking around us. At a sharp turn we leave the trees, and find ourselves on the top of an immense grassy mesa, looking out in every direction over a boundless expanse of blue. The impression is startling and wonderful. It is as though we were crossing a great yellow island all at once emerged from out of a turquoise sea. This fantastic impression lasts for several miles; then we begin the descent, receiving at the edge of the mesa the first announcement of the Cambria coal mines in great columns of black smoke. In a sudden transition from this dreamy height we drop into a cañon with a black atmosphere, where locomotives are whistling and switching, and cars are being loaded from a chute with a noise as of a hailstorm on a tremendous scale. We pass immense smokestacks, coke ovens smoking quietly, substantially built offices, stores, eating-houses, cabins and cottages, around which children, with facial lines comically emphasized by coal dust, run about and play. At the mouth of the cañon we are stopped by the town of Newcastle, which surprises us with a certain air of being a miniature metropolis.
Our hundred-mile drive across country from Newcastle to Rapid City is a grand epitome of all our previous drives through the Hills. We continue for scores of miles among ranches, farms, cattle ranges, and as many again over divides, from the height of which we get wonderful panoramas of distant hills and gleaming plains ; then down the divides we go over slopes of rich grass into glens and shaded parks full of grouse and red squirrel. We enter cañons that are lonely and resonant like seashells, then emerge upon grass land which makes the world seem like a yellow floor under a blue canopy. The horizon is constantly contracting and expanding around us. The sun rises and sets with extravagant splendor for our particular delectation. This is what Maupassant would call a wedding journey with the earth. The towns where we spend the night, or through which we drive, become mere incidents of the great mysterious life whose real features are dream hills and sunsets.
Somewhere in the last half of this hundred - mile drive we come upon the source of Rapid River, the largest and most impetuous stream of the Hills, and one of the few which carries its waters overground all the way to the Cheyenne. For a considerable distance it sings along quietly enough, picking up the contributions that trickle down side gorges, until its bed begins to tilt, and it is sent hurrying down a wild cañon to the valley. As our road climbs over its last divide, we can look down and see it describing shining curves through great flats of grass sprinkled with trees. Here the foothills open a wide gate, and on the very threshold, among these shining curves, lies Rapid City. No situation could be more favorable for a manufacturing post. Besides the advantages of the Rapid River as a water power, it affords a natural channel through which much that the Hills produce in minerals and agricultural products must pass and be transformed before it goes out to the plains.
The history of Rapid City in no way differs from that of the other valley towns of the Hills region. We have the same type of pioneers detaching themselves from the ebbing and flowing tide of miners ; exploring the valleys in search of a spot upon which to build a home ; and, with that human aspiration for stability which manages to fraternize with the spirit of migration, taking care that the chosen spot is an advantageous site, foreseeing that their homes may become the nucleus of a large settlement. The town is staked out with no more pretentious instruments than a tape-line and a pocket compass. One square mile is divided into lots, the lots are numbered, and the numbers are shuffled in a hat and passed around, and a new town is born. Rapid City is an ambitious, busy little place of four thousand souls ; grinding the wheat from the valleys, shipping the stock and packing the beef from the ranges, manufacturing brick, and supplying the farmers with cash.
We leave the railroad at Rushville, and find our horses here again for a twenty-six-mile drive across prairie to the Sioux Agency at Pine Ridge. We are reminded of the Hills only by an occasional bare ridge crested with a bristling fringe of pines which cuts the land into sections. Between long intervals of prairie we come upon the stricken-looking farm of a half - breed, or a lonely log cabin with the accompanying tepee standing beside it like a reminiscence. An Indian boy, with a half sheet of cotton thrown around him in lieu of a blanket, goes by on his pony, herding three or four bony steers. At a little distance, as he kicks his pony into a run, and sits with outspread arms yelping to his herd, one might take him for a diminutive Moor with a flying bournous. After a while the log cabins give way to board cabins; then, further on, these are grouped together in a manner somewhat suggestive of a frontier military post. This is the agency. The agent’s office is in a low frame building, with benches in front of it, where blanketed forms congregate for a lounge, a gossip, a smoke, or a redress of grievances. Here the agent sits at his desk for eight hours a day, and listens to complaints of all sorts, from the most tragic to the most trivial. He listens to an old man whose son has returned from Carlisle with an education so admirably calculated to open his eyes to the condition of his race and its need of civilization that, after lounging for some time in the paternal tepee, drawing his rations and meditating upon life, he finds that his “ heart is bad,” wanders off to a lonely spot and shoots himself. He listens to a squaw whose steer is sick ; to an old chief who has a one-acre farm, and thinks that the great father should furnish him with a horse plough, which might in a measure mitigate the hardships of a life of labor. An endless litany of miseries and absurdities, the daily rehearsal of a tragic farce.
This morning there is a great stir in the waiting-room adjoining the office. Indians are pouring in and forming animated groups about the room. We learn that our visit coincides with that of a senatorial commission. We discover friends among the commissioners, and find that we shall have the pleasure of attending a council.
We have seen the Omaha. The true name of this dance is the “ grass dance.” Its origin dates back to an incident which took place during one of the protracted tribal wars of the Indians of the lower Missouri. Both armies were encamped on the grass flats of the river. The Crows, if I mistake not, conceived the stratagem of rising in the night, tying grasses around themselves until they looked like sheaves, and then making their way, in a squatting posture, along the treeless plain to the enemy’s camp. The enemy were either asleep, or saw nothing in the swaying of the grasses that struck them as unusual. The Crows, accordingly, fell upon their foes and massacred them ; and there, among the dead, and still representing sheaves, they improvised a dance so spirited, so beautiful, in their conception of beauty, that it has been transmitted from tribe to tribe. The Sioux call it the Omaha, after the tribe from which they received it. It has been permitted to survive the Sun dance, because it is unaccompanied by physical torture. To the minds of educated Indians, however, its moral influence is far worse. They contend that it stirs the savagery in their nature, and that there lies much coarseness concealed to us under its grace and picturesqueness.
The Omaha House, in which the dance is to be celebrated, is an octagonal log house, some fifty feet in diameter. It is situated about five miles from the agency. We start after moonrise. The night is clear and white, the air deliciously cool without being sharp. We have an escort of Indian police riding on either side of us like phantoms. We go swiftly and noiselessly over the prairie, as though driving over a well-kept lawn. There is a group of buttes in the distance, lighted in white from behind, touched with silver along the top, and casting a great black shadow clearly defined on the ground. It has the appearance of a lonely Moorish town of white domes and minarets. Lights are moving about from tepee to tepee, forming queer constellations. The tepees themselves, lighted from within, glow like nightlamps of fine porcelain. The Omaha House is sending out of the opening in its roof a column of yellow sparks. As we draw near we find the building surrounded by a large crowd of women, many of whom are draped in white sheets, which cover their heads and are drawn up over their mouths with a decidedly Oriental effect. The shorter ones are looking in between the cracks, with their faces flattened against the logs; the taller ones lean over their shoulders, or crane their necks to strike the level of a higher crack. From within one sees an unbroken line of eager black eyes along the open space between the logs. In the centre of the house is a roaring log fire, which finds a glimmering reflection in all these eyes. The musicians are stationed in a corner. The orchestral instrument consists of a large drum suspended from sticks that are driven in the ground so as to insure the greatest possible amount of vibration. Twelve men sit around it and beat time to a spirited motif in a minor key, which is repeated without the slightest variation during the entire entertainment. The dancers are nude but for their breech-cloths ; and here one comes to a full realization of the injustice of the modern dress to these superb bronze bodies. They are brilliantly painted in reds, yellows, and blacks, the yellows being singularly effective. Their heads are bristling with eagle feathers variously tinted. Their ears are pierced all along the rim with as many as ten or twelve holes, from each of which hangs a silver ring and a pendant. Anything in the way of a long beaded tab, or a war-bonnet with great streamers of eagle feathers, is attached at the back of the waist, — a reminiscence of the glasses of the lower Missouri, no doubt, — and trails on the ground, emphasizing those movements of the dance which are entirely from the hips. At their knees and their ankles are strings of sleighbells, which form something of a selfacting tambourine accompaniment.
A tin clothes-boiler and several covered pots stand around the fire. In the clothes-boiler a fatted dog is simmering quietly. Every now and then the tin lid trembles with the faint sound of a cymbal, and from under the edges come fumes as of animal decay, made more sickening by being heated. There is also a large box of hard-tack, which is the agent’s contribution to the entertainment.
We are the only guests admitted into the house. As soon as we have taken our places one of the musicians thumps the drum ; then all twelve start in unison, with a wild yelp, on a high note in a minor key. The rhythm is marked by the most vigorous thumping, and the dancers spring to their feet.
My attention is particularly attracted to a very old Indian, the most conspicuously bedecked, and by no means the least spirited of the dancers. His dancing consists chiefly of a prancing sur la place, like a race horse before the signal for starting is given. He is tall and gaunt, with a face like the antique mask of Tragedy painted a deep red. His lips move in an incessant muttering, and when he breaks into a yelp his expression is singularly savage. The interpreter tells me that he is Iron Hawk, and that he played an important part in the Custer massacre. The Indians, usually reticent, it seems, in their references to that event, have frequently spoken of his splendid “ boast” made on the battlefield strewn with the unfortunates of the Seventh. He could be heard, they say, within a radius of a mile, as he walked about among the dead and recounted his experiences of the day.
When the dancers stop to take breath the yelping and thumping grow louder and faster, urging them on into a frenzy. Their muscles become tense, drawn along their thighs and under their knees like cords; their yelps become more and more strident; they prance and quiver, until the musicians finally call a halt of their own accord. Some squat along the walls and resume their pipes ; others throw themselves down in superb reclining poses, resting on their elbows, and screening their faces from the fire with their curved hands.
From this reclining group a figure rises suddenly and begins to pace the length of the building, turning on his heel with the swaying movements of a lion in a cage. After the first turn or two he begins his soliloquy, punctuated by light taps of the drum. The tones of this Sioux language are wonderfully impressive. It has the full vowel sounds of the old Spanish, all the strength of its gutturals, and much of the pompous grandeur of its inflections. This particular “boast” must refer to great achievements, if we are to judge by the grunts of both musicians and dancers, and the twinkling along the line of black eyes peeping in between the logs.
The soliloquy finished, the music begins with redoubled violence. The dance now takes the form of a pantomime, something that seems to indicate adoration, ecstasy, which would do well as an expression of sun or fire worship. It is all directed to the clothes-boiler where the dog is cooking, and means, in this case, that the choice morsel is done to a turn. Tin cups are distributed among the guests and the dancers; but the atmosphere, warm and heavy with tobacco smoke and the fumes from the boiling dog, has become unendurable, and we are glad to get out into the fresh night.
The moon is directly overhead. The Moorish town of white domes and minarets is drenched with light. Our escort of phantom horsemen is again with us. The noise of our wheels and of our horses’ hoofs is inaudible. We lose the last sounds that float from the Omaha House, and become submerged in that peculiar stillness which is of the plains and the desert. The whole world seems wrapped in a vaporous white dream.
October 29. It is a chilly twilight. We have left the Hills far behind us. Our train is streaking eastward through the farms of Nebraska. Our fellowtravelers are for the most part farmers, conversational and self-congratulatory. Beyond the car window the land lies in gentle undulations, which now and again stiffen into a straight line rimmed with red along the horizon. Here we find the tumbleweed again, the little lacelike bush with weak roots which the lightest wind dances over the ground like a puff of smoke, forever taking root and bein uprooted, — curious prototype of the migratory spirit of the Great West.
Antoinette Ogden.